Samsung's new portable SSD puts 2TB in your pocket

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Samsung ushered in last year by launching its first portable SSD, so it's only fitting the company should kick 2016 off by announcing a bigger, better successor. The new Portable SSD T3 is similar to the older T1 in more ways than one. It uses Samsung's reliable vertical NAND (V-NAND) memory, is capable of read/write speeds of up to 450 MB/s and though it's ever-so-slightly larger and heavier than the T1, the T3 is still tiny enough to get lost in a deep pocket. Arguably the most significant development is the jump in capacity, as the T3 will be available with either 250GB, 500GB, 1TB or a massive 2TB of storage.

The small, shock-resistant Portable SSD T3 also supports USB 3.1 and Type-C connections (as well as USB 2.0) for hooking it up to computers, smartphones, tablets and the like. And if you're particularly security-conscious, you can hide your data behind AES 256-bit hardware encryption by password-protecting the drive. A companion Android app will also let you change your password and see how much storage you've eaten into from mobile devices. The T3 is launching next month in the US, a couple of European markets, China and Korea before coming to other territories later, and unfortunately we don't have any pricing information to hand just yet.

It's not expected to come cheap, though, especially if you've got your eye on the higher-capacity models. The 1TB version of Samsung's T1 was roughly $600 at launch and you can currently pick up a SanDisk 2TB portable SSD -- which is much larger but also has almost double the read/write speeds of Samsung's pocketable drives -- for around $800.

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